Monday, August 18, 2014

AG: Let's see what else he (Andre Breton) says (in his first Surrealist Manifesto) - "…(the) omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitivly to ruin all the old psychic mechanisms and to take their place in the solution to the principal problems of life" - [(In other words, inspired automatonism as a response to a burglar or policeman or war) - After remarking that a number of poets from Dante to Shakespeare 'in his best-days" (sic) might be looked on as "super-realists" (Surrealists), on genius, he says] - "In the course of the various attempts which I have made to reduce and explain what is overconfidently known as genius, I have found nothing which could not in the end be attributed to some other process" - [(And then he gives a list of what his favorite precursors of Surrrealism are and what particular characteristics or qualities they have - and it's like a little Surrealist poem, that list, so that's why I put it in as a poem)] - "(Jonathan) Swift, a super-realist in his maliciousness,/(The Marquis de) Sade, a super-realist in his sadism./(François-René, de) Chateaubriand, a super-realist in his exoticism./(Benjamin) Constant, a super-realist in politics/ (Victor) Hugo is a super-realist when he's not stupid -

[Saint-John Perse (1887-1975)][Raymond Roussel (1877-1933)] "Let us cut the question short - The marvelous is always beautiful, anything that is marvelous is beautiful and only the marvelous is beautiful." [Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at twenty-five-and-three-quarters]